In July 1928, Mário de Andrade, poet, critic and unofficial artistic leader of his generation, introduced Brazil’s reading public to what was to become one of the best known and loved figures in the country’s literary, theatrical, and cinematic history—Macunaima: the characterless hero.

For much of the nineteenth century, the elite of newly independent Brazil had been happy to see itself reflected in the heroic and liberal self—image of the Romantic Indian warrior. His aristocratic pride, freedom-loving defiance and fraternal loyalty to the white man gave an mythical aura of legitimacy to the semi-colonial world of the plantation-owners and slaves. But the Abolition of slavery in 1888 and the proclamation of a Republic in the following year signalled the demise of that world. The period from the end of the nineteenth century right through to the accession to power of populist Getulio Vargas in 1930 was one of rapid change. While the coffee export sector was still important, Brazil’s society and economy were being transformed with large-scale European immigration, the growth of urban centres like São Paulo and the beginning of industrialization. All this was shifting influence away from the ‘coffee oligarchy’ and towards the cities. For the new urban classes and the military élite the Indian, black and mestizo peasant seemed to offer only negative models of national identity, rooted in a semi-feudal, rural past and, according to the racial theories of the time, in a biological and psychological degeneracy.

Mário de Andrade’s novel was far ahead of its time in the radical way it confronted the new reality, refusing the celebratory, essentialist ideas of cultural identity that the Republic expected of its writers. To those who looked towards the Classical traditions and the industrial technology of Europe as a means of fitting Brazil into the ‘universal’ history of European civilization, Macunaima posed a disturbing challenge. For here was an anti-hero, an enemy of order, a failure of progress, a ‘characterless’ psychological and cultural chameleon. Indian, black, and white all at once Macunaima is an overgrown child, infuriatingly selfish and irresponsible, lazy and oversexed, disloyal and destructive; yet by the same token, irresistibly subversive, irrepressibly mercurial, capable of defeating or escaping his enemies through his infinite adaptability and magical powers of self-transformation.

At the same time, Andrade’s prose ‘rhapsody’ exposed his middle-class city audience to a dazzlingly rich cultural world that had remained until then virtually invisible in the country’s literature. This was the world of popular traditions, celebrations, rituals and religious practices through which Brazil’s rural and urban masses gave meaning to their experience of life in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

With Brazil beginning to follow the model of European and North American development, the pre-industrial, non—Western communities in the countryside with their fragile ways of life were faced with a dilemma.

Macunaima can be seen as a dramatic reconstruction of that dilemma, as he proceeds on his fantastic journey from the magical pre-industrial cultural universe of the rainforest to the secularised, mechanical world of capitalist modernity. The hero leaves his Amazonian village for the city of São Paulo, in a quest to recover the sacred talisman left to him by the Empress of the forest. Ironically, though, in the course of confronting and eventually defeating his arch-enemy, the cannibalistic business tycoon Piaimã/Venceslau Pietro Pietra, he adapts so effectively to the commercial, technological culture of the city that his entire identity is undermined, and the betrayal of his origins leads inexorably to his self-destruction.

While Macunaíma was going about his business he came across the very tall tree known as Voloman. Sitting on a branch was a bright green pepper shrike with red brows. On catching sight of the hero, it cleared its throat and sang, «Look who’s coming down the road! Look who’s coming down the road!» Macunaíma looked up intending to thank it and noticed that the tree, Voloman, the Tree of Life, was heavy with fruit. The hero had gone hungry for many hours and his belly balked at the sight of all the oranges and lemons, the sapotes and simatoos, the grapes and grenadillas, pineapples and pomegranates, mangoes and mombins, sweetsop and soursop, all kinds of fruit hanging from its branches.

«Voloman, give me some of your fruit!» begged Macunaíma. The tree refused to give him any. Then Macunaíma shouted this spell, twice over, «Boiôiô! Boiôiô! Quinzama quizu!»

All the fruit fell from the tree and the hero stuffed himself till he was gorged. This annoyed Voloman so much that it grabbed the hero by the feet and dragged him far away, to the other side of the Guanabara Bay, to a desert isle which had been inhabited in the olden days by Alamoa, a nymph who came with the Dutch. Macunaima was so tired that he just hung there asleep during the flight. Still asleep, he was landed underneath a very smelly bitter coconut palm at the top of which perched a vulture.

At that very moment this bird felt the need to perform its daily duties and covered the hero with its filthy droppings. 60-61